1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for matching client interfaces with service interfaces.
2. Description of the Related Art
Software developers often want to integrate business applications with various business services, such as web services, legacy applications, databases, Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), etc. One solution is the J2EE Connector Architecture, part of Java 2, Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.3, that specifies a standard architecture for accessing resources in diverse Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). The J2EE platform provides a reusable component model, using Enterprise JavaBeans and JavaServer Pages technologies to build and deploy multi-tier applications that are platform and vendor-independent. (Java, J2EE, Enterprise JavaBeans, and JavaServer Pages are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc.).
A developer uses J2EE by writing, for each service to which the application connects, one Connector Architecture-compliant resource adapter. Each application extends its system once to support integration with any number of resource adapters and underlying services, such as web services, legacy applications, databases, Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), etc.
An Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) is a collection of Java classes, following defined rules and providing specific call-back methods, and an XML file, combined into one single unit. Session beans model business services and expose EJB remote interfaces, which a client will use to invoke the services.
A developer of an application may want to expose a target component and service interfaces to a client component and client interfaces to allow the execution of the client interface to result in the execution of a corresponding service interface in the target component, which may be on a remote server. Thus, the client interface is mapped to the service interface, where the client and service interfaces may be implemented in different computer languages. The Java API for XML Based RPC (JAX-RPC) provides a technique to bind a client interface to a service interface that executes on a remote machine. A service client uses a JAX-RPC service by invoking remote methods on a service endpoint. A JAX-RPC service client can call a service endpoint that has been defined and deployed on a non-Java platform. The invoked service endpoint may comprise a web service. With JAX-RPC the client and the target service share an interface/contract described by a WSDL document (Web Services Description Language).